"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television." -- John McGahern
John McGahern (12 November 1934 — 30 March 2006) was one of the most important Irish authors of the latter half of the twentieth century.
"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.""But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.""Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.""For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970.""I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.""I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.""I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.""I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.""I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.""I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story.""I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.""I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.""I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.""I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.""Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.""My father was very outwardly religious.""The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.""The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.""We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.""When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.""When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.""When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.""Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.""Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church."
Born in the townland of Knockanroe about half a mile from Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, John McGahern lived there until his mother, who was the local primary school teacher, died. The family then moved to Cootehall, County Roscommon to live with their father who was a Garda sergeant in the village. John travelled form Cootehall to Carrick-on-Shannon every day where he was educated by the Presentation Brothers.
After secondary school, he was offered a place in teacher-training at St. Patrick's College of Education . Upon graduation he began his career as a primary schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Báiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf where, for a period, he taught the eminent academic Declan Kiberd before turning to writing full-time. He was first published by the legendary London arts review, X, founded by the painter Patrick Swift and the poet David Wright: " The extract in X attracted interest from a number of publishers. Fabers, among other publishers, wrote to me. T. S. Eliot was working at the firm then.”
McGahern's novel The Dark was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied sexual abuse by the protagonist's father. In the controversy over this he was dismissed from his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England where he worked in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm near Fenagh in County Leitrim, located halfway between Ballinamore and Mohill.
He died from cancer in the Mater Hospital in Dublin on 30 March 2006, aged 71. He is buried in St Patrick's Church Aughawillan alongside his mother.
McGahern's six novels follow his own life experiences to a certain extent. His first published novel, The Barracks covers life in a rural Garda barracks especially from the point of view of the sergeant's wife, Elizabeth Reegan. Like McGahern's mother, she is dying from cancer. The author lived in the Garda barracks in Cootehall from the age of 10 until he left home for work.
His second book, The Dark covers the teenage experiences of a young scholarship student in rural Ireland. The main character, Mahony junior, has to contend with his father - who beats him and the other children - as well as indecision about what to do with his life after secondary school. McGahern's (real) father was also a difficult character. He lived on a farm after his retirement - by which time the author had left home - and also treated his children harshly including administering dangerous beatings.
The next novel, The Leavetaking introduces us to Patrick Moran, a young schoolteacher in Dublin. The novel is set during his last day in the school. He will be formally fired that night for having married a divorced non-Catholic woman during a leave of absence year. The novel flashes back to how he met his wife, how exactly the church authorities fire him, and further back to his own mother's death. The book is a close reflection on McGahern's own experiences of being dismissed from his teaching post in the early 1960s for much the same reasons as Patrick Moran as well as the scandal caused by his second book, The Dark, with many sexual references.
In 1979, The Pornographer was published. The protagonist who writes pornography for a living is now living in Dublin. He has a sexual relationship with Josephine and she becomes pregnant. The pornographer is not keen on keeping the baby, or his connection with its mother. The novel again covers the subject of death by cancer - the writer's aunt in this case is dying in hospital - as well as visits to rural Ireland.
His fifth and best known novel is Amongst Women, the story of Michael Moran, an IRA veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, who now dominates his family in the unforgiving farmlands of Co. Leitrim, near Mohill. The book is remarkable for its detailed and understanding portrayal of a hardened, and unapologetically idealistic protagonist. An ex-IRA commander, Moran detests the 'small-minded gangsters' who now run the country for which he fought. Though Moran's presence surely dominates the novel, the positive attributes of his stern moralism (Moran doesn't touch alcohol, for one) and sense of self-worth are passed on to his children, who become successful adults (both emotionally and financially) in both Dublin and London.
This is a return to Roscommon/Leitrim setting after two Dublin/London books.Once again, it seems to fit into a sequence, with the "McGahern" character most closely reflected by Luke, who left home, emigrated to London, and refuses to get close his father again. Unlike Luke, McGahern did return home from Dublin for visits, but his difficult relationship with his father did make such visits awkward. He is portraying the house he left behind with the remaining kids being brought up by his father, his father's remarriage, and his young brother's struggles with his father and school.
His final novel That They May Face the Rising Sun (published in the United States as By the Lake) is an elegiac portrait of a year in the life of a rural lakeside community. McGahern himself lived on a lakeshore and drew on his own experiences whilst writing the book. Lyrically written, it explores the meaning in prosaic lives. He claimed that "the ordinary fascinates me" and "the ordinary is the most precious thing in life". The main characters have - just like McGahern and his wife - returned from London to live on a farm. Most of the violence of the father-figure has disappeared now, and life in the country seems much more relaxed and prosperous than in The Dark, or Amongst Women.
McGahern is also considered a master of the Irish tradition of the short story.
McGahern was a member of the Irish Arts honorary organization Aosdána and won many other awards (including the Irish-American Foundation Award, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and the Prix Etranger Ecureuil). He taught at universities in Ireland, England, the United States and Canada. In 1991, he received an honorary doctorate of Trinity College, Dublin. His work has influenced a younger generation of writers, such as Colm Tóibín. Some of his works have been translated into Japanese and other languages.
McGahern is generally thought to have exhausted the tradition of rural Irish modernism, although many younger writers continue to copy his detached and knowing style.
The Barracks (1963) AE Memorial Award, McCauley Fellowship.
The Dark (1965)
The Leavetaking (1975)
The Pornographer (1980)
Amongst Women (1990), Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991), GPA Award (1992), nominated for the Booker Prize (1990).
That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001), Irish Novel of the Year (2003), nominated for the IMPAC Award. Published in the USA under the title By the Lake (2002)
Non-Fiction
Memoir (2005). Published in the U.S.A. in 2006 under the title All Will Be Well.
Love of the World (2009) Collected non-fiction and essays.
Short Story Collections
Nightlines (1970)
Getting Through (1978)
High Ground (1985)
The Collected Stories (1992), includes the three previous volumes of short stories (some of the stories appear in a slightly different form) and two additional stories - 'The Creamery Manager' and 'The Country Funeral'. The former first appeared in Krina (1989).
Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (2006) contains several stories collected in The Collected Stories, here revised by McGahern for the last time. Again two new stories, 'Creatures of the Earth' and 'Love of the World', are included.
Drama
Sinclair (1971) (radio)
Swallows (1975) (television)
The Rockingham Shoot (1987) (television)
The Power of Darkness (1991) (theatre)
Films
Amongst Women was filmed as a television mini-series in 1998, directed by Tom Cairns, and starring Tony Doyle as Moran.
One of McGahern's best-known short stories, Korea, was made into a feature film of the same name directed by Cathal Black and produced by Darryl Collins in 1995. In 1996 Korea won the Asta Nielsen Best Film Award at the Copenhagen Film Festival and was runner-up for the Audience Prize at the Seattle Film Festival.
